The Best from The Best Schools … Ritalin Gone Wrong, and Why Money Doesn’t Drive Morals

Two days ago, in “Human Nature Watch 5: Is Depression Good for You?,” I reported on a surprisingly level-headed and humane article in The New York Times challenging our newspaper of record’s standard Darwinian-reductionist line on human nature.

Today, I am delighted to report on another recent article that speaks sensibly about medicine and human behavioral problems. I hesitate to announce a new trend on the strength of a couple of articles. But if trend there is, I welcome it wholeheartedly.

Perhaps we should all write letters to the Editor to encourage whoever it was who decided to buck the dominant reductionist narrative line at the Gray Lady by publishing these two excellent pieces.

Some of us wouldn’t waste much time on the Gray Lady down, but exposing the “drug store” approach to failure in school is overdue.

and

Morals and Money: Seems celeb economist Paul Krugman is not pleased with a new book on social inequality.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist and regular New York Times op-ed columnist is intensely irritated by all the attention accorded by the press and the punditocracy to Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012).

Today, Krugman pushed back against Murray in a column whose title, “Money and Morals,” I have adapted for mine.

Murray’s controversial thesis, you will recall, is that the widening income inequality in America is the result of an even more yawning gap in moral values between managerial-class and working-class Americans.

11 Responses to The Best from The Best Schools … Ritalin Gone Wrong, and Why Money Doesn’t Drive Morals

Yes, the West is caught in a mire of depravity. The right exploits the First Commandment as a political front, while the right uses the Second Commandment.

The venal, materialistic right economically oppresses their connaturally more spiritual fellow-citizens (God made the poor to be rich in faith), while at least publicly defending the external moral order provided by Christianity, which is proving, by default, so vital to our societies.

The Labour party in the UK, on the other hand, without the blessing and anchor of faith, in the form of its primary founder, Keir Hardie, a Methodist lay-preacher, who once declared that all he had ever fought for in his political life was inspired by the Christian Gospels, has changed allegiances. Now their proteges are the rentier sector – just like the Tories.

Many atheists among the lower, social classes must have been created by the scandal of the truly wicked economic oppression caused by the arch-hypocrites of the ruling class, right up to WWII – not least in the leadership of my own Catholic Church, under Pius XII.

Chomsky stated that as late as 1938, Britain could have prevented WWII…. but the Nazis were good for business. Mussolini was once knighted! Hailsham’s slogan, when he stood for the Tories at Oxford, before WWII, was, “A vote for Hogg (himself) is a vote for Hitler”. And he won. It has been claimed that it was another politician of another party, but A J P Taylor was a meticulous scholar, whatever the deficiencies of his personal character.

So, it is not perhaps so surprising that the atheists very soon took over the Labour party. What a front the Second Commandment gave them in such circumstances! Inevitably, however, before long they began to show their true colours. And worse, they have spread the hypocritical message of diversity (read, ‘anything goes’) parroted by people who, in one of the most fundamental of human relations, opt for copulating with members of the same sex!

However, human affairs are never a simple matter, and now it turns out that the public-school people constitute one of the last and strongest bastions of Christianity. I ssupect it has often been the case that hard-nosed ‘go-getters’ who made their pile, nurtured their progeny to be kinder. The mustard seed must also be one of the hardiest of seeds.

Nevertheless, I think it sits ill with the right, the comfortably-off, to point the finger at the anarchists of sexual morality, when the polarisation of the wealth in the West has, with a certain poetic justice, led to such a catastophic, global, economic catastrophe, and has indeed, contributed massively to the moral degradation of the poorer folk.

“Fear not those who can kill the body…”, Christ enjoined; but it was not his intention to deny that one must physically survive, before grace can build upon nature.

Descended from a long line of rabbis, Marx, moved by compassion, lamented the poverty of the desires of the poor.
Thatcher lamented the same, but solely as a parasite wishes its host to not solely survive, but to be as esurient and covetous as itself in their attitude, all the better for itself to thrive and prosper from their labours.

Look at our media, with female journalists – yes, more than one – lionising, raving about Madonna and Jordan, as role models for young girls. What chance have the so-called ‘underclass’, custom-made by the monied people, when they have such little belief in their own intelligence, and look to the educated, however subliminally, for guidance.

I could go on. But what’s the point. Anyone, at least over the age of sixty, can see the utter degradation and wickedness into which the country has been dragged, proximately by the ultra-deviant left, yet enabled to do so, because of the callousness shown towards the public by the right. Between the devil and the deep. Truly feral economics, the effects of which make the feral behaviour of many youngsters at street-level seem almost trifling. Unless you live in a poor area, that is. But who, in the fifties or sixties would have imagined primary-school children raping and sodomiszing each other? Try telling either political wing that freedom implies responsibility… not least on their own part.

“I take it the country is the UK? I am 60, live in the UK, and cannot see utter degradation and wickedness. What were you thinking of?”

Well, I can’t speak for your canons of right-living, can I?

“primary-school children raping and sodomiszing each other

I have never heard this story – when, where?”

I don’t keep a chronological or a geographical record of any of the examples of extreme moral degeneracy, but it has ben reproted in the daily papers, I believe on more than one occasion.

Jamie Bulger was sexually-assaulted and murdered by two ten-year olds. They had watched hard-core pornographic videos belonging to their parents.

Incidentally, it takes many forms. Apprently, there are 450 public employees at present working on legislating for hospital staff to be forbidden to use the terms, ‘mother’ and ‘father’, for fear of offending the sensibilities of homosexuals.

Is that it? A horrific murder that happened nearly 20 years ago by two lunatic kids that society recognised as abhorrent and quite extraordinary – and some people lobbying for some (admittedly absurd) restrictions on speech which have may not happen (and probably wont).

The current UK is going to have to do better than that if it wants to rank among the degraded and wicked eras.

Where are the public executions, the burning of heretics, the bear-baiting and cat burning as form of entertainment?

Even the golden age of the 50s included laws and attitudes to homosexuality that resulted, for example, in Alan Turing committing suicide – one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the century and a major contributor to defeating Nazi Germany.

“– and some people lobbying for some (admittedly absurd) restrictions on speech which have may not happen (and probably wont).”

“Probably” is hardly good enough. It’s all part of an ongoing campaign, though, isn’t it? A judge recently designated ‘abnormal’ as a hate-word. What next ‘deviation’ expunged from science text books?

Also, in your dismissiveness, you forgot the primary-school children raping and sodomising their little class-mates.

In today’s papers, two young women, each with a baby sired by the young man in the middle of the photo. We’ll leave their sexuality out of it, since there is no arguing with homosexual lobbyists, however “ad hoc”. The immemorial wisdom of nature’s nuclear family is despised by today’s atheist know-nothings.

Like the young people referred to above, I expect Turing was a very nice young man, but being ‘brilliant’ is not an automatic mark of merit in the Christian canon. As I pointed out and you confirmed in spades, I can’t speak for your canons of right-living. Evidently Turing’s intellectual superiority elevates that unfortunate young man enormously in your eyes. Pardon me if I don’t share your value-system, won’t you?

In the next life, someone who was technically a cretin here will have no advantage over Einstein in terms of understanding physics or any other sphere of worldly wisdom, were either to be sufficiently bereft of joy in heaven to bother with it.

I did indeed leave out the primary-school children raping and sodomising their little class-mates because you were unable to provide an example and I don’t believe I have ever heard of such a thing.

You in turn seem to have left out the public executions, the burning of heretics, the bear-baiting and cat burning etc which were not only common place but fully accepted by British society a few hundred years ago. Against this you raise your concern about other people’s sexual preferences and some campaigns to limit the words we use (which I don’t approve of – but hardly compare).

You are quite right of course – no one should suffer what Turing suffered – but it seems a particularly strong indictment of the society of the time that it should subject someone who did so much to overcome to win the war and halt Nazi Germany to this treatment.

You may indeed, Bydand. Why, I believe you have even had the temerity to do so.

However, I emphatically disdain the challenge as a risibly characteristic ploy of the atheist fraternity. As if I would feel the need to convince the invincibly …. shall we say… nescient. It will be a sorry day indeed, when I feel the need to argue at any length with atheists.